An Update On Our Parkinson’s Research Community

At 23andMe, we are committed to advancing understanding of human health and disease, and to giving everyone an opportunity to participate in scientific research that is meaningful for them. We launched our first research community focused on Parkinson’s disease in 2009 with those goals in mind. Less than two years later, we’ve already made amazing progress, having enrolled nearly 5,000 people with Parkinson’s (including one of the world’s largest databases of rare LRRK2 carriers) and gathered 40,000 data points about their experiences with the disease. With this initial data set, we’ve not only replicated existing genetic associations with Parkinson’s, but have also discovered two novel genetic markers associated with the condition which may further our understanding of the causes and point to potential avenues for treatment.

One of the most encouraging aspects of this community-based effort is the speed with which we’ve been able to grow the community and make these discoveries. Traditional disease cohort recruitment and data collection is time-consuming, and sometimes decades can pass after the first study participant is enrolled until findings are published. Our unique web-based research platform significantly accelerates this timeline, and we have already submitted a manuscript for peer review describing our first findings.

Click here to read more in our official update to our Parkinson’s community. (23andMe customers can also view this page here.)

Our paper is currently undergoing review at a journal so unfortunately we can’t disclose details about the findings. We hope that the review process goes smoothly and that the paper is published before the end of the year, though. Once it’s published, the findings — and the paper itself — will be made publicly available!

Maureen Markov

Thanks for the results and so looking forward to seeing the paper here.

mm

p.s. sign me up if you ever look at parkinsons childrens without parkinsons (yet) genes for comparisons, that would be interesting, too.

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